Wanderlust
by Willow-Bee the Cat
Summary: What Coraline Jones never knew, she suspected, and she knew.


Disclaimer: I neither own nor make a profit from Coraline, Supernatural or the Sevenwaters Series by Juliet Marrllier.

Spoilers: Everything for the novel Coraline, allusions toward events in the Sevenwaters Trilogy, and mentions of the events within Supernatural.

Rating: T (for language)

Warnings: None

Summary: What Coraline Jones never knew, she suspected, and she knew.

Author's Notes: I'm sorry about the triple crossover. However, don't worry, all the Sevenwaters references are pretty much understandable for anybody who has not read the novels. I chose to use the novella rather than the movie for Coraline, because while the movie was really very well done, the novella lost something in translation to the big screen. This means there will be no Coraline doll with button eyes and no Wybie. Dean appears briefly, but the focus is on Coraline and the other characters from the book. This is mostly in chronological order, although the there are some which are not, particularly the one at the end.

* * *

By the time Coraline was born, psychics were generally accepted and valued by the hunter community, although on occasion there was somebody who thought all psychics should die, merely for the sin of being born with abilities beyond the ordinary. April Spink and Miriam Forcible had some talent reading tea leaves, but she never knew, never realized that once upon a time they'd been professional psychics well known to certain members of the hunting community, that they'd supported themselves by working as actresses. And she never knew that they'd only worked as psychics for hunters they knew and trusted in the wake of the hunter that nearly killed them for being devil worshipers. One by one those trusted hunters died until of hunting accidents, the things they hunted finally getting the better of them, and old age until only Mr. Bobo was left of those who knew of Miss Spink and Miss Forcible's abilities.

* * *

Unlike Mr. Bobo, April and Miriam moved to the Pink Palace Apartments not because of the Sidhe known only as the bedlam, but because of a vision. All April had known was that she'd seen her great grandson, his wife, and her great great granddaughter in danger of some sort. The last thing she'd expected was a member of the Unseelie court-a ghost or a ghoul maybe-they tended to go strange once they eaten live flesh- but the Sidhe had almost completely withdrawn from human society well before William the Conqueror had landed upon their shores.

* * *

It is said that those who spend time in the Otherworld come back changed… if they come back at all. It was true for Coraline Jones and it was true for April Spink. Three days-April could have sworn she was gone for only three days-yet thirty years had passed. Like Coraline, in the wake of her… _adventure_, she found herself an anachronism in a world that only truly believed in science upon her return. They were relics of an older time, when people knew and accepted that the supernatural was reality.

* * *

Nobody, not even Miriam, knew that April had once been married or that when she'd realized her husband had found another wife and her daughter-the only one of her children to survive-was a wife and mother herself, April had chosen to stay away that than destroy their belief in the safety and normality of the world.

* * *

Coraline never knew that her mother locked the door to the other mother's little world because she had realized there was something odd, something supernatural about it. She always blamed herself for not hiding the key or destroying it, for how it had broken Coraline.

* * *

She'd always known there was more truth than fiction in the stories of the old country-of Ireland-that she'd learned on her grandmother's knee, but it was not until the bedlam tried to steal Coraline that April realized that the tales of her ancestors' adventures were probably true. Coraline guessed-rather accurately, in fact-but never knew for sure why April chose to spend her afternoons telling her stories about fantastical and terrible creatures and epic adventures beginning shortly after the defeat of the other mother.

* * *

When the bedlam's hand escaped, several weeks after she trapped it in the old well, it was Mr. Bobo who destroyed it, cutting it up with iron blades, covering it in salt and burn the remains. Coraline never knew how the key had gotten out of the well, or what happened to the hand. In a haze of terror Coraline had made sure the door to the other mother's was locked and took the key to the woods, started a fire and burned the key to slag.

* * *

Coraline was eleven the first time she found a pattern marking supernatural activity. It started with an article in the newspaper and ended in a trip to the library and two days of going through back issues of the local paper. Mr. Bobo had found her in the garden looking over the photocopies of articles stretching back to 1843 and hesitantly she'd explained the pattern she'd found-after all, he'd warned her not to go through the door to the other mother's realm. Two days later, Mr. Bobo told Coraline that a friend had taken care of the problem and that if she were to find another pattern, he would be more than happy to arrange for it to be dealt with. She never knew that what she'd found was the ghost of a little boy who'd died as a result of injuries received while working in a local mill.

* * *

Mrs. Jones loved gardening-everywhere the Jones' lived, they had an herb garden, whether it was just a window box or extensive plots like at the Pink Palace-and she taught Coraline everything she knew about plants and herbs just as she'd learned it from her own father. Coraline knew her grandfather had abandoned her mother and grandmother, but there was so much she didn't know about him. Coraline never knew about the sleek, dark fur skin her grandmother had hidden-the same fur her mother, Mrs. Jones had found and innocently shown to her father. Nor did Coraline know her grandfather had returned to the sea he'd come from.

* * *

When Mr. Bobo died, he left Coraline almost everything; his hunting journal, half a dozen books, half a dozen book, and his weaponry. She didn't have much use for the guns and bullets-Coraline had no idea how to use them and never did learn-but the crossbow, knives, crossbow and other, somewhat obscure weaponry (how did Mr. Bobo manage to get a pole axe and a broadsword?) were a different matter entirely. Coraline rather suspected that Mr. Bobo had been a very good hunter-he had to have been to have survived long enough to die of old age-but she never knew he'd been one of the best hunter in Scotland, Wales, and England.

* * *

The first time Coraline went on a hunt-a couple weeks after Mr. Bobo's death-the thirteen year old had no idea that one of Mr. Bobo's old hunting buddies followed her as Mr. Bobo had requested in his… unofficial will. By that point Coraline had found a baker's dozen of patterns, of cases, and Mr. Bobo had felt it would only be a matter of time before Coraline went hunting. Much to the surprise of Mr. Bobo's friend, despite being woefully under armed and terrifyingly green by most hunter's standards, the only person Coraline got killed was the psychic using her pyrokinetic abilities to kill her enemies.

* * *

When Coraline was sixteen, almost seventeen, she tells her parents that since she's finished her secondary education, she doesn't see a reason to spend an extra two years in school just to take her A-Levels. Coraline had never intended to attend a university anyway, she'd much rather travel the world. Mr. Jones was horrified, he demanded to know how she would support herself, how she would live-because he wasn't paying for a world tour. Miriam merely gave her a list of her old theatre contacts in London. April on the other hand gave her great great granddaughter the little stone with a hole in the center; it had been protecting her family for well over a millennia and it was time for it to be passed on to the younger generation. Mrs. Jones had nodded, a look of resignation in her mulberry eyes and presented Coraline with a cord so that she could wear April's stones as a necklace. She'd made the cord of celandine, juniper, heather, and lavender, in addition to a thread each of silver, copper, and iron wire, all woven around a strong strip of leather. She wove her love and every protection she could think of into the cord, hoping it would keep her baby safe. Neither Coraline nor Mrs. Jones ever learned that centuries earlier another woman had woven a similar cord for her older sister, to hold the same stone with a hole in its center.

* * *

Four years later Coraline met Dean Winchester in a bar in a small town in Ontario. She was hunting a yuki-onna-a deadly type of supernatural creature that rarely strayed from it's native Japan, Siberia and Alaska. Dean, she later guessed, had been hunting a ghoul which had been feeding upon the dead in the area. For two weeks they shared a bed in the rat hole apartment she rented by the week-by that point she'd been hunting the yuki-onna for over three months, it was rather difficult to track with frequent snow storms. They spent those two weeks trying to feel alive, connected to another being during the night and carefully avoiding explaining their quirks during the day.

Coraline looked the other way when Dean woke up swinging the first and last time she shook him awake. She ignored the knife he slept with under his pillow, the glimpse she caught of guns after she'd seen the protective charms on a mass of chains about his neck the night they'd met. Likewise, Dean said nothing about the protective symbols scratched into the door frame symbols and wards carved into window and door frames. Nor did her comment on the pentagram tattoo under her left collar bone or her extensive knife collection and set of archery paraphernalia or folklore obsession.

Coraline never knew that it was her pentagram tattoo which later inspired Dean to get himself and Sam their distinctive tattoos to protect against demonic possession.

* * *

The day before Dean Left, presumably to return to the U.S., Coraline repaired the holes in his clothing, sewed loose and missing buttons back on-despite how uncomfortable anything to do with buttons still made her, even twelve years later-and did what she could to protect the hunter she'd likely never meet again while Dean slipped in and out of a fevered sleep. Coraline was relatively sure the injuries had come from the ghoul, but could not be sure. She'd taken care of his injuries to the best of her abilities after he stumbled into her apartment shortly before dawn. She knew he wouldn't like what she'd done, but could only hope he'd understand.

When Dean discovered the unfamiliar embroidered into the inside of all his shirts, trousers, and jackets, he made an emergency side trip to South Dakota on his way to meet his father and Pastor Jim in Blue Earth. Pastor Jim and John Winchester might had been damn fine hunters, but if one wanted information on obscure occult related symbols and phenomena, Bobby Singer was the one to speak to. The little bundle of herbs he found in the glove compartment of the impala only made him drive faster.

Bobby examined the embroidery, the cloth pouches from the trunk, Dean's duffle bag and the glove compartment and muttered something about Winchesters and idiots.

"What'd I do?" muttered Dean, nursing a beer.

"Tell me everything you remember about this girl."

"She said her name was Maeve Walker. She was average height, very curly black hair, freckles. Her eyes were odd… purple-not Liz Taylor purple, real purple. She had a pentagram tattoo. I thought she was a hunter-she acted like a hunter, had wards and scars like a hunter."

"She probably is a hunter, you idjit," snapped Bobby. "Or a civilian ember of one of those old hunter families. Or maybe she's a sorceress or a real Wicca, not one of those new age idjits. This Maeve certainly knows her magic."

"A witch? I spent two weeks living with a witch?"

"These ain't the sort of charms a demon worshiper would know. A sorceress is like a psychic, they're born with their powers. They tend to have powers like in those old fairytales. You don't run into them much, they like to keep to themselves. Historically, Wiccas were wise women who knew their herblore, midwifery, and usually something about the supernatural as well. There aren't many of them left-witch burnings and modern medicine took care of that-but there are still some running around, taught by their mother or grandmother. The charms she slipped you are for protection and love-before you say it, they're not some love spell-the combination of dogwood, yarrow, juniper, apple, and lavender is powerful, very powerful. You should put the charms back, they should be enough to protect against most human and some supernatural dangers, so long as they're not particularly determined.

"I'm assuming you sweet talked yourself into her bed. She think you made her any promises?"

Dean snorted. "She was the one who said it couldn't be more than a couple days. Something about how she was moving on when winter ended. Maeve said she was going back to her roots and wandering the world."

"She embroidered a Rowan Cross into all your clothes. They're protective symbols Irish women used to embroider into the clothes of their brothers, fathers, sons… husbands and fiancés. They're meant to help protect a man while he's off fighting or raiding."

* * *

Coraline was not particularly surprised that the twins had inherited her mulberry purple eyes. They were her eyes, her mother's eyes, her grandfather's eyes. It marked them as descendants of the Sorceress-admittedly not a woman to be proud of, although there was a rather _lovely_ fairytale based upon her actions-but her ancestors had more than made up for that Oonagh's misdeeds. Although Coraline had no idea why their eyes were purple-not blue as most infants' were-when they were born. She could only assume that it was the result of their supernatural lineage. So far as she knew, her family had stuck to humans in recent centuries, but in the past that had not always been so.

* * *

Coraline didn't know what the Winchesters had done to catch the attention of a powerful demon-and whoever this "Meg" really was, she was frighteningly powerful as demons go-but she was rather sure she was going to hurt Dean the next time they met. It was a miracle she'd managed to get herself and the children-herding a pair of three year olds was hell-out of the apartment-she'd taken a break from hunting until the twins were older-before Meg managed to break out of the room Coraline had trapped her in with salt. She spent the next four months in constant movement. There was no way she was going to let that demon bitch touch her children.

* * *

Coraline dreamed of a man and a mausoleum and the gun he used to open it. She dreamed of a cloud of black demon mist. A little blonde girl with white eyes laughing as rivers ran red with blood, fire fell from the sky, and angels walked the Earth.

A day later Coraline set her car toward New England, a pair of dozing four year olds in the back. She pushed the car she'd stolen into one of the five Great Lakes-minus it's license plates-and snuck across the border into Chicago by boat. A purple eyed truck driver picked Coraline and her children up and drove them all the way to Portland. There the small family boarded a fishing trawler crewed by purple eyed men more than happy to discretely take her to an island off the coast of Maine. It was times like these she was grateful she'd gotten into contact with her maternal grandfather's family. The Walker family might be large, prone to wandering-it was from that side of her family she'd gotten her wanderlust-and more than a little wild and vicious, but they were loyal to a fault.

She took over the cabin her cousin Dan had told her she could use, if ever she was in the area, several years prior. In other places people might have thought it odd when Coraline hired several of her cousins to help her build a pentagram of iron bars with the cabin in the center and a six foot iron fence around the edges of her property, but as a good tenth of the population of the island was made up of the Walker family, nobody said much of anything.

It was impossible to know whether her dream had really been a portent of things to come or merely her subconscious piecing together her fears and the signs she'd been seeing. Coraline had no idea what she could do about the end of the world, but she'd no intention of being where the demons would go when they went searching for victims, and cities and towns with a population over five hundred were certainly high on the list.

When reports began coming in about the town whose residents disappeared off the face of the planet, she could not help but feel vindicated in her caution.

* * *

"Is Daddy bad man?" asked her little girl, shortly after Coraline returned home from her job making herbal remedies for Dr. Aislinn Walker, the only doctor on the island.

"Mary Fainne, where would you get an idea like that?" She waved at the babysitter, little Eileen Walker.

"Zachary Johnson said Daddy's a cereal killer. But he doesn't kill breakfast. And Betsy O'Malley says Daddy killed lots of people, not cereal."

Coraline let out a sigh. "Johnny Dean, come sit on the couch with Mama and Mary Fainne."

This was not a conversation she wanted to have with her four and a half year old children, but obviously they needed to know. Mentally she cursed the neighbor children, but with a population of four hundred, there were relatively few options of children Johnny Dean and Mary Fainne could play with.

She pulled the two of them into her sides, cuddling them to her as she thought about what to say. How could she explain Dean's recent appearance in the news. He'd supposedly murdered and tortured who knew how many in St. Louis, robbed a bank a year later, and now he had apparently committed a massacre in a police station.

"Daddy's a hunter, like I am, except he hunts all the time. He hunts the things that hurt people, and sometimes when you hunt, you have to break the law, because normal people wrote the laws, and normal people don't know about the supernatural like we do. Daddy was hunting and the things that he was hunting blamed him for the things they did."

Coraline had no idea whether or not that was the truth, but what else was she supposed to tell her children? And anyway, one thing she knew for certain was that while Dean Winchester might be many things, he was a good man.

* * *

When the children were seven, she began to teach them to use magic. She'd been teaching them the folklore since their first bedtime tale and herblore since they were old enough to help her in the garden. When she was eighteen, she'd met Dan Walker in Finland. He was the first person with mulberry eyes she'd met other than her mother. It was Dan who'd taught her to use magic, taught her proper sorcery. She used Dan's lessons as a model for her children's lessons. She'd never given her suspicions words, but she knew her grandfather's name had been Dan Walker, and she knew her sorcery teacher bore an uncanny resemblance to the one image she'd seen of the man. It could all be chance-after all; it was not that unusual for names or looks to run in a family.

* * *

A couple weeks after Dean was dragged to hell, Sam Winchester wandered through Maine hunting a demon. Ruby wasn't with him-for once-something he would later be grateful for. There had been a small family in the booth across from his. He'd paid them little mind, until the little girl had screeched something-the only thing he'd caught was Dean. He'd turned to discretely watch the little family-a mother and two small children-unsure exactly why he was torturing himself this way. He examined the boy first, he was black haired and lightly tanned with light eyed-maybe blue or gray. The boy-Sam was relatively sure his name was Johnny Dean-looked remarkably like Dean had right around when their mother had died. The girl with her long brown curls looked like their mother. She looked like Mary Winchester had. The woman called the girl Mary-Fawnyeh or something that sounded like that-it was Gaelic, he thought.

He felt something tighten in his chest. Then he took a closer look at the children. What were the odds that he would run into children with those names, children who looked so much like family?

The woman was attractive enough to catch Dean's attention, but Sam couldn't for the life of him remember encountering her, but that didn't really say one way or another whether or not these children were Dean's. And then he saw the pentagram tattoo peeking out from under the neck of her shirt. He did remember Dean telling him about the woman he'd gotten the idea of using pentagram tattoos from.

There was only one thing he ever managed to keep from Ruby, to keep from Lucifer when he was possessed years later and Castiel and the other angels. Winchesters protected their own, and there was no way he would ever let that demon know about his niece and nephew. Nor would he permit those angels-even Castiel, who was on their side-to know that there might be other options for Michael to possess.

Coraline never knew the lengths the brother of the father of her children went to to keep her children safe.


End file.
